I've been discussing the digital evolution and how artists need to evolve with it since 1995. A lot of people considered me a digital harlequin pulling rabbits out of a 3D hat. The fact that this article came out in the LA times to explain all the Hollywood gloom lately (which you can cut with a digital knife) suggests to me that EarsXXI & PlasterCITY are definitely on the right track.

THE BIG PICTURE

In a losing race with the zeitgeist
The era of moviegoing as a mass audience ritual is slowly but inexorably drawing to a close.
Patrick Goldstein

November 22, 2005
http://www.latimes.com/business/custom/cotown/cl-et-goldstein22nov22,0,6581563.column?coll=la-home-headlines

Showbiz people are prone to exaggeration, but when everybody is
exaggerating about the same thing, you know something bad is
happening. There's a dark cloud of unease hovering over Hollywood. A
top CAA agent calls it "mayhem." A studio marketer says "it feels
like Armageddon." A production chief puts it this way: "Each weekend
there's more blood in the water."

Malcolm Gladwell might call it a tipping point.

The era of moviegoing as a mass audience ritual is slowly but
inexorably drawing to a close, eroded by many of the same forces that
have eviscerated the music industry, decimated network TV and, yes,
are clobbering the newspaper business. Put simply, an explosion of
new technology — the Internet, DVDs, video games, downloading,
cellphones and iPods — now offers more compelling diversion than 90%
of the movies in theaters, the exceptions being "Harry Potter"-style
must-see events or the occasional youth-oriented comedy or thriller.

Anywhere you look, the news has been grim. Disney just reported a
$313-million loss for films and DVDs in its fiscal fourth quarter.
Sony has had a disastrous year, with only one $100-million hit
("Hitch") among a string of costly flops. DreamWorks not only has had
theatrical duds but also saw its stock plummet when its "Shrek 2" DVD
sales fell 5 million short of expectations. Even Warners, the
industry's best-run studio, laid off 400 staffers earlier this month.

Although the media have focused on the economic issues behind this
slump, the problem is cultural too. It's become cool to dismiss
movies as awful. Wherever I go, teenagers say, with chillingly casual
adolescent contempt, that movies suck and cost too much — the same
stance they took about CDs when the music business went into free
fall. When MPAA chief Dan Glickman goes to colleges, preaching his
anti-piracy gospel, kids hiss, telling him his efforts don't help the
public, only a few rich media giants. Say what you will about their
logic, but, as anyone in the music business can attest, those sneers
are the deadly sign of a truly disgruntled consumer.

There are still optimists who say the sky isn't falling, who insist
that a few hits will turn things around, or gas prices will come
down, or that the business being off 7% this year has more to do with
the absence of a left-field sensation such as "The Passion of the
Christ" than a long-term decline in moviegoing.

To them, I say — go ye to Costco or Best Buy and watch the giant
HDTVs zooming out the door, the TVs that used to cost $7500 that now
go for $1995 and allow middle-class people to have a marvelous
moviegoing experience right at home without $10.50 tickets, $4
popcorn, 20 minutes of annoying commercials and some guy in the next
row yakking away on his cellphone.

Once people spend all that money on a home entertainment system,
they've got to feed the machine. I've watched friends who used to
regularly go to theaters mutate into adjunct professors in DVD-ology,
scanning the ads for the new video releases and rhapsodizing over
Netflix the way other people swoon over TiVo or XM radio.

This only highlights the biggest crack in the system: that most of
the movies in theaters don't deserve a theatrical release, at least
not by the rules of today's game. Until the DVD and pay TV money
kicks in, they're money losers. Yet the studios are forced to spend
more marketing money every year to chase after increasingly resistant
moviegoers, then go dark for months before spending another big chunk
to remind people the DVD has arrived.

The studios have no one but themselves to blame. Motivated, as
always, by an obsession with quarterly earnings, they began shrinking
the DVD window from nine months to six months to 90 days. Universal's
"The Skeleton Key," which opened in theaters in mid-August, made its
DVD debut last week, barely three months later. When the six-month
window still held sway, the theater beckoned — half a year felt like
a long time away. Three months seems like just around the corner. All
too many movies, even ones with big stars in them, including "The
Weather Man," "In Her Shoes" and "Dreamer," have died on the vine,
with millions of Americans staring at the TV spots and thinking,
"I'll wait and see that on DVD."

And that's just the adult side of the equation. What's really driving
the studio folks crazy is that a huge chunk of their core
constituency — young moviegoers — has evaporated. Poof! They've
scattered to the winds. Young males aren't just AWOL from movie
theaters, they're also not seeing the studio's TV ads — either
because they've stopped watching TV altogether, or because they've
got the TV, iPod and IM all going at the same time — not exactly a
situation in which an ad leaves much of an imprint. The only movies
that are reliable drawing cards today are behemoths such as "War of
the Worlds" or "Harry Potter," or cheap youth-oriented genre films
such as "Saw II" or "The 40 Year-Old Virgin."

One of the movie industry's crucial failings is that it's simply too
slow to keep up with the lightning speed of new technology. Who
would've believed six months ago that the day after "Desperate
Housewives" aired on ABC you could download the whole show on your
video iPod? But when someone pitches a movie, it takes at least 18 to
24 months — if not far longer — between conception and delivery to
the movie theaters. In a world now dominated by the Internet, studios
are at a huge disadvantage in terms of ever lassoing the zeitgeist.
Everybody is making movies based on video games, but it seems clear
from the abject failure of movies such as "Doom" that it's almost
impossible, given the slow pace of filmmaking, to launch a video game
movie before the game has started to lose its sizzle.

New technology is also accelerating word of mouth. Thanks to instant
messaging and BlackBerries, bad buzz about a bad movie hits the
streets fast enough to stop suckers from lining up to see a new
stinker. Even worse, the people who run studios are living in such
cocoons that they've become wildly out of touch with reality.

That's the only explanation for why Sony Pictures could've imagined
there was any compelling reason this summer to see a wan remake of
"Bewitched." Or why any of the studio's highly paid executives didn't
wonder why it should shoehorn an obscure family movie into the one-
week window between the Disney-powered "Chicken Little" and the
latest "Harry Potter" juggernaut, especially when the movie,
"Zathura," has a title that sounds like it should be followed by the
warning "side effects may include leakage or sexual dysfunction."

The ultimate perk of being a studio chief is having your own
screening room, which puts only more distance between you and the
rabble — ahem, your customers — who spend $75 to take the family to a
movie. Too often studio people have the same ideas about the same
things, a groupthink that has led to them anointing one Hot New Thing
after another, from Josh Hartnett to Brittany Murphy to Kate Hudson
to Colin Farrell, who've yet to connect with rank 'n file filmgoers.

What should studios do to come to grips with this new era? In a world
bursting at the seams with new technology, it's hard to justify the
antiquated idea of studio development, which keeps churning out
movies such as "Be Cool," an Elmore Leonard novel from 1999 that was
hilariously out of date by the time it reached theaters, having a
storyline that revolved around Chili Palmer's exploits in the music
business, perhaps the least cool place on the planet.

Hollywood needs a new mindset, one that sees a movie as something
that comes in all shapes and sizes, not something that is wedded to
the big screen. Studios have to do what record companies refused to
do until they nearly went out of business: embrace the future.

People increasingly want to see movies on their terms, today on a big
TV at home, tomorrow on an iPod or cellphone. It breaks my heart that
people have fallen out of love with movie theaters, but if I were
king, I'd start releasing any movie with multi-generational appeal on
DVD at the same time it hit theaters, so the kids could get out of
the house and the parents could watch at home.